Nocternity

Avalon Brantley
(In Honour of RJD)

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 Nocternity 2

Nyx
For me
The newborn sun,
Since for silver orbs I salivate,
And I now see the star-spattered patterns
Which are adorning thy deepblue belly
Whereon a Chronic god ejaculates,
Like a wish which aches to come true,
As his sick-lick pendulum points at you.

Black Goddess arise, sweeping Time ascythe,

For thou art everyone and Nun.
And in abandonment to thee I writhe
Neath the sickle swing of the midnight moon,
And I bleed, for I am a Fool for thee—
So attend thy son! Come suck-kore me!
And all thy dark
Will be
d nE

, you’ve got to bleed to entrance Her…

Fool Fool … look for the answer!
Fool, Fool, Fool!

The fumigation with torches

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 I

In vocationi sanctae, a votive work have made, and proffered ‘pon the wide flat stone I
encountered in this mountain glade, beneath a faultless raven-wended welkin of black above,
whither wonderstruck I approached enrobed in nothing save vespertine gold and vermillion,
ochre and umber and amber and under the last sickly azure which, e’en as I watched, drank
in the inky Easterly stain I well know for your train O my Goddess, you came! my pallid
Thessalian Queen, O my ebon-haired Hecate marmoreal—remember thou me!—Kybele or
Ishtar or all the names wished for, vibrated in chantment at thy dark architraves from
mountains and vales and shorelines and caves, Inanna incarnadined in the delicious liquidity
of Sundying, come vanquish the terrible Light O Venus Inversa, plunge the Earth into
Oceans of your comely unlight, you who have favoured me before by the breeze-borne births
of so many petal-delicate, nubile amours, conceived from images I culled from out the foulest
of bloodwrit grimoires, Nyx Pan-Matrix which hath opened at my call, Nox witch hath
unlocked all gates at my knocks, opal-irised Diana swathed in cloths of celestial silk, who in
argent suddenness exposes herself before an awe-jawed and orgying woodland throng:
crimson-eyed visages cavernous with ardent sharpened grins beneath the glorifying arms of
all these autumn-gilded aspens, their branches extended as hands entorched, embracing and
blazing, whispering worship in verses with the suddenly chilly winds, leaves descending in
interspinning ecstasy, an entrancing glomerular maelstrom glimpsed only by the embers of
gloaming, as all thy denizens dance and sing with me, thy devotees, all these and I and all I
see and all I don’t before thee praise thy names in song, a raucous vibrato of anthem and
psalm, but ah someone else opened up doorways and for a moment I thought I had bodily
slipped away, nay but I know these successes must be of my crafting as now with skyclad eye
I can descry a new moon arising, invisible to me mere moments before, a bare orb of
magnificent darkness that now seems O O O so bright! and I am far far far too amazed to feel
afraid now no no though these new unsightly shadows seem to burn, seem to learn, and then
to teach, seem to release all the Others I thought I had succeeded in chaining to the flame,
despite which fire I feel so cold, in deed it seems did lose my hold on the shadows of the
night, the shadows of shadows, and now I am afraid, though I must insist to myself that I am
safekept inside all my circles and rings, where I’ll remain, and patiently wait out the night
that I too often wished would neverlonger leave me, my devotion failing, since it was but a
game I played, a pastime and an exercise, all mere creations of my imagination, just a lark,
though not so funny in the dark, formlessnesses unfolding themselves from the intertangled
triangles in the mangled manacles of my mind now that despite all my charting and gazing I
haven’t even the faintest inkling what hour or era is written there, on the overarching
parchment of the sky (save for the hour when I must die?), as anon those shadows’ shadows
are nearer than all my painstaking constraints should have ever allowed them to trespass,
these crow-dark encroachers which despite their unintelligible tongues I readily apprehend:
and the death-deep and dread-ridden sentence they commit me to…
Fade into shadow … YOU’LL BURN! You fall….

The fumigation from ambergris

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 II

The Sin (full) moon is trying us

Laughing in laps with Yesodic delight
Descending like an adolescent’s test
He is—surpassing surpassingly bright!
Each beam seems to be a languid lingham
Of long and boney light
Extending to oh so lovingly kniFe the nuptial Night,
She whose iron womb dew-wetted
Outspreads to beg for him,
Nanna-Su’en, Sun of the Night,
He that though dead yet is risen again.
Lubricious maws emerge
From earth to seize and surge
Upon the long deceased and stiffening
Corpus of this demiurge,
As waves may nip and lick about
A masthead in its foundering
And move like curs by moonlight lashed,
With maledicted wailing.

So long I wended, as insane

As Melmoth in his wandering,
Came back amidst these barks and beams,
At the shores of the World of Suffering.
And from a temple I found in its form-haunted hinterlands
I stared and witnessed this:
How a stately and silver-clad priestess there stands,
And how she feeds the Darkness,
How like hounds it will collect itself to eat right from her hands.
And how I admired them: Shadow and seductress,
How all her cold Carrara it caressed,
And likewise I longed so to fawn upon the temptress,
To reverence every inch of ivory thigh and breast,
Nor dare presume to brush one raven tress;
Contented just to orbit in her glory,
With all her slavering dogs or slave castrati,
Devoted to the spinner who mensally devours me:
I worship Hecate by way of her body,
I that though dead yet have risen again.

*
The fumigation from glandular musk and hashish

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 I0I

)O(
Empress of the Night!
My mistress of emanations tri-partite,
Virgin, Matron and Beldame sans Merci
Hear my voice, heed my flame and favour me.
Lady Lovely, Belladonna Deathly,
I crave the black, yawning yoni of you.
Kore, Sophia, Demeter, Leukothea,
Take my light from the ‘life’ of this tomb,
Ananke, Ananke, how I’ve needed thee, ah!
Whorl me back from the world to your womb.

At the edge of the unending ocean,

By the ebbing of ebony waves,
My body of light was flung off of the qliphoth
Back into the tides whence it died into life,
Back into the floods whence I came.

Hearts are made to be broken,

And faith is designed to be lied to;
Love was created that something be hated,
And life’s only meant to be died to.
The Universe is but a moment which shatters eternally,
But a moment that can only be known from internally.

We sailed into Never on zephyrs of sighs,

Our crew ne’er full certain, the fool from the wise.
We reached up for starlight and blinded the skies,
And bowed at how light bent in other men’s eyes,
Neath their reins bowed and chains loud and promises made, how
Our souls sought the bodies’ demise.
So how could I bear to sail on?
O Sleep, hand me in bands back to brother Oblivion.

*
The fumigation from civet musk and myrrh

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 IV

Invasion! to access the excess, a blood-flood unstoppered that showered from the dusty
lamps of butchered bodies, citizens strewn as straw across silent twilit streets. Slaughter
stainted the shriek-stretching winds, attracting jackals through the breaches in the walls;
they prowl here now in place of traders.
No! Enki! Enlil! Ea! Someone turn the sun around!
Alas—the last sabre edge of sunset sinks through the distancing sand as Night unfurls
her sable veils across the outlands of Babylonia. An ancient, sickening djinn some have
known to call Samiel storms through the gates in the form, not of a cloud… rather a simoom.
And his is the only voice, save the yelps of dogs fleeing the sting of his wings, slitted glint of
his eyes and invisible grin, and he howls as if he were more hounds than they, all in ecstasies
of pain, and buzzes like a swarm, whilst he dances black Samas in the suffocated lanes.
Palms bow and thrash in wretched supplication. He wrenches birds from nests, doves out of
cotes, doors off their hinges. The sheets of dirty cloud thrown by his devilish dervishing
hang a shifting mask across the lurid, pus-hued moon who has perched atop the distant
empty ziggurat like strigiform LILITU. The temple is become a tomb—the clergy murdered,
and priestesses gutted post ravishment.
Once he has satisfied his lonely need for exaltation, Samiel deserts the ruined city.
Scraps of clothing, and papyrus, and flax he found where some woman—her poor lost
ekimmu now forever snatched away—had left it drying on her rooftop some somewhat
brighter yesterday, these all feebly follow in his wake, a futile chase with the wind, until in
the darkened stillness the last rustle dies.
I am the last left alive. It is barely even so. I would sell my soul for a skin of water.
The only moisture is the last spit I spat for a protection spell… and it seems it held true—the
demon didn’t sense my hiding here, beneath this broken market cart. But all the other
formulas failed us, and the Hittites have returned; their gods must be stronger. Our proud
little city was taken in a day, and clutching still their bloody lances, their forces are marching
onward beneath the traitorous constellations to which we had prayed. Their battalions have
grown so strong since the shattering of Ebla and scattering of her sons only five short years
ago. I believe they are ready to fall upon the very gates of Babylon!
And how bleak and black my own fate! I am alone in a city full of death, and the
scratchings and thumps of torn and broken shadows shifting with the wind; and recalling the
old stories—those my mother told me first—far older than the founding of these now fallen
walls—I shrink in terror, and dare not admit the tiniest flame to a lamp. The night insects
incant Alaziff, and faintly, nearing, I hear the jealously giggling Igigi.
I had thought the dogs returned to the streets from their hiding, but these proceed
upright. They have no need—would not have come here—for the dead. No, they have come
to take me, the very last!
Ishtar, remember! Give me thy light! O raise up thy palm and open thine eye—
shelter thine ever-faithful son! Hasten, O HASTEN!

The fumigation from opium and cedar

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 V
empires,
(I and mine are)
Legions of the Grave,
Awaken! Venture forth
And evoke for me the storm!
Bid it shackle and smother the sun,
And act the chariot for Mother Night
The sooner she might disinherit the Light
From the Earth that shat us back.

Artemis dressed in glistening ivory,

Thy waxy light has animated this body,
Arrested the corruption, induces my extraction,
As I outstretch these mighty though unseeable hands
To shatter every stratum—velvet, mahogany, marble.
O Atramental Hecate
Our entelechy lies in crimson-lit lechery with thee.
We swarm up from beneath our moss-coated monuments,
To creep through vales of insect crepitation,
Veiled in crepes of miasmatic mists
Where forest shadows stitch together Her tenebrous empire,
Stretching up branches like brands to the heavens,
Trying to burn the sun with our darkness.

Blood is the life, and more—

It is the hierophant for that Beyond the Door,
A Soma pressed from donors yet still possessed of breath…
And whomsoever inbleedeth in me
Shall not perish, but live everlasting death.

In the stead of a soul I hold a never-bending light,

One of a spectrum perfectly inverted from the visible,
For there isn’t light when no one sees,
Yet I’m a shadow shining ever-bright

The fumigation from mastic, mace and scammony

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 VI

We were so young, or so we seemed, or so we made one another, once. We changed so much,

made so much, made the World changed. Earth turned pastoral, the Heavens a tortured
pastel, and linnet-wings linked us to the softfire skies surrounding evenings we wished never
would die, as bucolic hillocks in the fast-fading distance drank those last lovely colours to the
lees, last seen not in the air but rather where they were diverted into silver rivers that ran as
God! I wish we had, out of this dark-bitter existence here, together, whilst nightingales
commenced their quick crystalline chorus for us: Nuit, Nuit, knewit-knewit-knewit. If only
we had … but no, we’d not have changed a thing, not for the World, nor the sake of
Temperance, or Judgment—not of men, nor gods’. Their Justice could never be just for us,
all their restraints and petty expectations. The Tower of stone they’d have us mortar with
our blood and scaffold with our bones, it crumbles, always, forever, failing, falling, whilst
they scramble and babble their demands for more faith, more devotion, more sacrifice from
us, it’s never enough. But I never cared to grovel in the golden halls of their dominion, was
less than impressed with the World they had made us for, top-heavy with self-appointed
Emperors and Empresses, with all their minions and liars and whores, was reluctant to
genuflect before their purported mysteries—the deceptions reflected in their Priests and
Priestesses—the blacks they said were really white, the nights made day with liars’ lights. I
forsook all of it, and all called me a Fool, dismissed me from their society. Indulgences for
my youth at last expired, they made me outcast, beggar, a pariah. I turned miserably thin,
and stayed that way. Adolescent wastrel grew into a dirty and indigent Hermit. I became
invisible, at best.
But then Fortuna turned her Wheel, and you saw me. You saw me! And so too what
could shine through me, what made me different, even beautiful, and a mighty conduit for
more than the Maya of this transient dunghill. You saw the shining continuum of soul
through the soiled exterior, and you joined yourself to me, and we made a new being called
Us, so that all at once I was far far more than my mere self. We were magic! I became an
omnipotent Thaumaturge through you—realising how suddenly there was nothing in the
Universe I could not possibly do, due to you! You were my idol, my goddess, my Shekhinah.
I’d have stolen you the Sun, caught his Chariot of ever-molten gold with my own hands, or
lassoed you the Moon from the lassitude of her cloud-mussed and star-pricked bedclothes
and shackled her as a pearl to put upon your finger—not through any Strength of mine, but
by the fires you set burning in me, breast and mind. So flawless in my eyes … how I melted
when you gazed at me. And when you smiled, my heart brimmed, spilling over, like a cup far
too small for its blessings. And when you gave to me your pledge, your hand, I was suddenly
lost no longer—you were the Star by which I knew where heart and home are.
But nothing stays in the past—and though time is a neverending journey, love is a
neverlasting smile. The Wheel always turns right back around again; now I am alone once
more, devoided of her. It is painful to remember, and I have learned in the day to turn my
head away.
And yet, in dreams I think of you—your eyes that, still, find mine, as once again I
witness your perfect face paling, those last soul-rending moments of bloodloss, the trembling
and weakness in your hands and breath as beneath the impassive glare of ice-white Death
you drifted away like a wisp of mist I wished I could keep here, somehow held in these
helpless arms. And Devil-eyes sintillated for a single mocking second in the dark, narrowed
above an unseen smile, before slipping away into the noxious not-colours that imbue the
borders between Night and the nightmares I pray the fates have spared you.
I will come and I will go, forget and almost remember, incarnate and collapse over
Aeons, like a Star, all in the endless search for where you are. And I will find you, just as

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 Nocternity 9

surely as I will lose you once again. And so, smiling bitterly at the old noble truth that I am
fated forever to learn and to forget—that the suffering which churns throughout Eternity to
somehow make it so, it will never depart from my shattered essence—there will always be
some me enduring these unendurable agonies—and so in a strange, paradoxical state of
restless peace, I will Hang myself from the absolute highest branch of Atziluth— sometimes
by the neck, sometimes by my foot. Like a god.

The fumigation from frankincense

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 ViI

Come night I rise to write in starlight—against all sage advice—the hand that pens the air—
can open up the doorway there—you who have stolen my heart in the day—come now—let’s
away—spend a vision with me—walk beside me through these fields—(these places
inbetween the known and day-to-day—and of course in the nighttime no place is the same
place)—in these steppes things grow differently—sensually—sentiently—the grasses sway in
such a knowing way—they flow and ebb with your breathing—as if they are part of you—lie
with me here—just you and I alone on this holy knoll—let me know you now—intoxicate—in
ecstasy—we sense the sentience of all this vegetable world—soliloquys of scents and
stretching gestures—slowly we learn how to offer our responses—flowers sigh in reply—your
eyes turn at last to glance your answer into mine—Yes!—come then darling—come with me—
plunge starward—love in falling—here even æther is imbibable—drips from smiling lips—and
we drift as spumes of mist upon our returning—monkshoods fling back masks to bask in the
moonflood—clean-plucked henbane broods in the roosting brain—we are made drunken on
datura—tender milk of mandragora—the warm root still moves in your hand—do not hesitate
love—night-blooming jasmine incensed by the evening wind swing thuribles of pallid
inflorescence—whilst taller vespertine flowers toll from atop viny towers—each campanulate
blossom knells an Angelus for secret Sabbaths kept in black—yes my darling bella donna I do
know that it’s late—and that only solanaceae are so awake—but wait! see what has ascended
through the twilight’s agate gates!—the old secret world returns for those whose souls are old
enough—you will need to borrow new eyes: see now through the Imbrium et Serenitatis
Maria—how they always looked like eyes to me!—by their gaping light the nightsky becomes
a canopied bed wherein we seem to see the sleeping Endymion inseminating Selene—tides
arrive at her climaxing—spent she rolls away beneath a coverlet of cloud as cold winds close
in from the north—a horn winds overhead and we look aloft to find the skies teeming with
furious riders—I throw my cloak to shield your wonder-full eyes from that godawful
portent—hooves detonate overhead as wall-eyed mountain-sized horses erupt in and out of
nebulous manifestation—swords and hammers spark fires that seethe across the nightsky—
black billows explode and unroll across the infernal firmament—Old Wuotan bellows
cannonades of laughter through the cracked and tangled landscape of his vastly-bearded
visage—Gwynn ap Nudd grins a knife-blade through his soot-black head as at his heels the
Hounds of Annwn pitch themselves through blasted starvault—Hernunnos glances down at
me—bloodlit eyes in a bone-blank face majestically crowned by a tangle of tines—and niger-
eyed Hister also rides—unStuck from his iron cage—attended by a train of hole-headed
dismembered dolls in his wake which fly in flops like drowning fish—impossibly volant—a far
and forlorn cry from the angel-like beings that once they were—and the tumult of more than
a thousand wars overfills the ears and sky as the holocaust careers across Europe—the storm
at last passing—before the final dust of their cavalcade has infaded the distance and unveiled
the moon again you raise your glistening eyes—and Diana hasn’t a prayer of outshining you
My Beautiful—and in the anaemic peace of your radiant essentia a kindlier magic emerges—
the black mounds of cattle herds grumble from their reassumed slumbers—Oberon
contentedly smiles—such that breezes barely sigh—and waters move no more than in scarce
concentric response to the tiny invisible ballet thereon—and beyond—spritely shadows spin
through green lanes turned once more to silver—and see on the green brow of the hilly
mound overlooking the gurgle-voiced ghyll—all the ellyllon maidens thereon—their timeless
forms which flit and sway there with such anciently nubile alacrity—soundless unshod feet
on the ring-bounding sward—green eyes and honey hair and milkwhite skin exceeding fair—
ivory fingers invitingly bend in beckoning—and from the wooded vale below pucks and púcas

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 Nocternity 11

frolic and smile—and from the nearby mines lantern-eyed coblynau and kobolds emerge—
there is a narrow pathway there—but we will tread with care—where basilisks twist in the
darkness—and cockatrices—between the oak and yew—through each druid-drawing grove—a
Will-o’-the-wisp sways jauntily to ghost-light us the way—past caves and cairns that bristle
with whispers—ruby eyes and carving-knife smiles—lips that lisp in libidinous hisses—lamiae
and succubi—the dusky musk of their marshy bodies clings at us with the mist—we hurry by
to cross the rude clatter-planked bridge—a rag-clad hag rises from the rocks to beg of us—
hurry hurry! she is not what she seems—but a gwyll—old crone of these craggy hills—brown
four-sided hat hiding mossy locks—we pass her by—and ascending the bedrock-carven steps
we arrive—to dance away centuries—in an hour—your feet aflame from the friction—your
hands in mine—and theirs betimes that we be friends—and Robin shall restore amends—as
our most dark and regal goddess Nótt trots her steed Hrímfaxi across their final tranquil
stretch—her mount as weary as we are again—his foam adorns the hillside glades—it is the
hoarfrost left in autumn—and the dewdrops set there in the everbriefer summer—awaiting
their minute to shimmer—before like our visions they vanish forever—forgotten—come the
dawn.

The fumigation from benzoin resin and rose

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 VIiI

I am No-one,
I am Legion,
Nether and æther,
And neither,
Both Sin and the Sun.
Yes I am Virgin.
I’m a whore!
Giving all things, to take them,
To make Nevermore.
My name is Saturn,
But out of Time!
Ride the nighttide, fall from pride
Up to the Abyss sublime!

Ai! Eye! Aye!

I am standing alone,
But I own all crowns!
III
On the edge of the plane,
But the light can’t cut the hiero down.

I am Titan!
I am God!
Your despoiler, and healer,
The serpent and rod.
I’ll smash Creation, but with a smile!
Flood and fire
My desire,
To bring you through unto me,
All my children, so many,
Your number is but one,
And all of your names
Were always lies
Save one and
It is
I

The fumigation from storax

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 IX

A lifetime or so ago, still all but a youth at the time, I left my life of daylit cares, abandoning
the grey-brown ease of our cityscape, that hive of tiny minds, and forsaking also hearth and
home and family. With abrupt unregretting decision, I turned steps aside from even the
highroads that purport to lead venturers away, since those roads draw a body inexorably
back that way as well and always will. They are like the dusty tongue of a beast which,
despite its being dying or dead, persists in devouring the small self-imprisoning beings which
built it. Those roads are too easy; the departer is deceived—the straight way will change his
mind; he will become his own warder again, in time.
Therefore and thenceforward, a staff in hand, I plunged myself into the embraces of
vast and pathless wilderness, following star or cloud or indefinite fire through every never-
named desert and hollow, forest and marsh, arid grassland and airy mountain, the heavens
overhead a passing tapestry of successive tempest and fleece-streaming peace… or of holy
indigo inter-erupted by starmonds. I found myself shelter amidst the dust of derelict
dwellings; in the dewy damp of grottos which groaned in the night like grief-haunted
sleepers; and beneath the roots of ancient fallen trees—roots which gnarled overhead like
spiders frozen in the moments of taking their prey; and I hermited in neglected provincial
orchards where haggard limbs depended like an hag’s fingers that once when young could
outstretch to offer fruitful temptations; and inside half-collapsed huts beside the cracked and
scattered wood and granite remnants of unremembered cemeteries, and in the mouldy shells
of forgotten churches, officiated by only the owl at the hour of Compline, or by diaconates of
bats, and then attended in the day from the rafters by congregants of ravens and doves.
And there is power in this emaciated freedom … I have learned to gather the wind
enough to nearly fly, to read the writing in the air, have whistled along to the tenuous chorus
that forces steadiness into the shimmering of things.
But this journey, this circumintrospection, it is more than mere escape for its own
sake. No, I did it for a dream I had. (Have…? !) And I have kept that dream, treasured it,
protected it ... and on my lonely way I have found that I am not the only one. Others too
have glimpsed the silver mountain to the east, rising higher all the time, how even the sun
and stars and all other wanderers bow low before its holy brow. And from the lips of other
road-roughened rovers, sometimes over the scraps of our meagre meals, more often through
echoes muttered afterward from the realms of their own destitute and dissipated dreams, I
have learned I was not the only one in the world to have so glimpsed, so gleaned, so
dreamed. There have been many such pilgrims, a million æons of us; I have heard how some
endured in the search, through far more than lifetimes, to climb in the end to its snow-
crowned eminence. You, whose ear I have held all this time, like a child, your elderly mayfly
child—Please! Give me a sign to build a dream on!
…but did I wait too long, wander too long, turn somewhere wrong? Have I been
astray, or simply deceived? But how? How could I possibly have been misled by the
direction from which the dawn always came? Where is the summit I sought, was so certain
of that sometimes I saw it? I believed that this road was the right one, this way I have taken
for so much of what’s been left of this life. I am so old; now any mission must be nearing its
end. Still, how can it be, that ahead on the morning-bound way I have kept to all this time,
faithfully, there is now so much blood on the eastern horizon, where I see that old Sol has
turned to ashes, been taken by wind, and in that same impossible direction he seems to
remain, sinking like a dead seed, never to rise again for me—there, where there is no silver
mountain, no sign of that which I was so much more sure of than all the deceptions of
solidity? But there instead there lie before me only the grey-brown walls and towers of the

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 Nocternity 14

self-same city of my yesterlife. And so at last I am at home; not here, no, save only in the
devastating knowing that I never had a home at all. Nor ever shall.

The fumigation from jasmine

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 iO
(Branley/Hollis)

the Sun has died.

or might as well have done—i’ve not seen him for so long. so long!
all is cold and empty.
it is the Long Dark Night of the Soul
(…or would be, had we stayed an anima-
l persistent in the belief in 1)
((_the sole_souls are surely only those___to be found___under_foot_))
…and if i knew for sure whether it were Night or day out there anymore…
although regardless, either is equivalently Long and Dark, cold … and … empty
i can scarcely ascertain with any certainty that i
even am (((even))) am even
alive
… i breathe …. my heart … howsoever … listlessly … unwillingly …
… persists … in this … purposeless … beating ….
.like the rain.
rain is all that moves here now
in this deadsilent house
…perched on a precipice…
…on the edge of the abysm called Abandon…
…lip of the Maw of Nothingness,
that yawns in her awesome indifference.
spheres within spheres, cells in-carn-serrated in cells.
i’d like to try to live my life again
but i have already died inside
:i see:
so much neverbegending vacancy—
in this amniotic amnesiacal dreaming
i see how
i am the house,
the precip-
ice, and the abyss
as well…
wishless as well
and i am beside myself the both of us this unhappy and hopeless.
i should have taken it upon myself
to die young
while there was still time,
before i became this decrepit,
tumbledown ramshackle derelict,
this abode for rodents, unwanted dogs, things insectile.
where did the time go? i thought,
…tomorrow never comes…
yet now there is only the restless sleep
and my own faithless wake for me to keep,
and soon: candlelessly.
it is the Long Dark Soul of the Night
and something from out of its awful obscurity
has taken up the mask i once called ‘me’,
if only for appearances’ sake…

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 Nocternity 16

so now i see: it has always been you:

the angel assigned me
was a Shadow.
accept me now, then,
you … or anyone …
open up your … arms? … wings? … jaws?
i cannot tell, nor care for such distinctions any more.
i would snuff out the candle by any means now.
take me home.
goodNight cruel world

The fumigation from Cretan dittany

***

©2015 Avalon Brantley

 ii

(the ending is just the beginner)

And though all the Darkness has hidden this
All roads lead the roamer to one.
It’s the only road I know.
And I see now, how it didn’t matter
What I didn’t know, what I didn’t believe,
Or that I was never truly right, nor ever really wrong
After what I said to my self
Across unbridgeable gulfs
Of intimate adjacency:
That All that God Is
Is The Teacher
The Student
The Test
Ω

The fumigation from galbanum

©2015 Avalon Brantley